kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Mário Luzeiro <mrluzeiro@xxxxx>]

Hello Maciej, Tomasz, Torsten, all,
I found that you are related with GAL development, I have some questions and discussion for you, hope you can help me make some things a bit clear.

Some requests:

- Would it be possible in a near future, to detach the "glm" library from GAL (folder) and maybe make a common include file for the use glm? Since the 3d-viewer is also using the glm, and last time we had problems with the define of radius in radians.. maybe it can be a way to fix this issue.


- Would it be possible in a next near future, think to reimplement some of (general) modules related with openGL to have in mind the reuse in other modules in kicad? I mean, example: can we have a shader loader manager to be used by different parts in the sources and not just for GAL? Or any other (openGL / gml) very general code that can be reused in other parts..? So it will not be rewritten and duplicated in the sources..


Now more specific questions, just so I can try to understand a bit more of the openGL / GAL / Pcbnew:


- openGL / GAL is not currently the default mode, does it have anything to do with openGL support? Does Kicad have any limitation policy to not support or limit the use of openGL (I mean.. openGL versions and shaders versions in this case). (Other way to make the question: Does kicad want to support old-school PC plataforms / graphics board? so we can't make the full step switch)


- Do you think is would be possible to do in some way what GAL/openGL do in Pcbnew but now to display it in 3D? Would that be an appropriated way to do it for the 3D-viewer? (Ie: generate it via shaders (lines, circles, etc) VS generate it via polygon mesh)


- If that makes sense, would it be eventually possible to reuse GAL/openGL code in the 3d-viewer some how? in that case?


- I have no knowledge about the "inter application communication" on Kicad, but I see that when you click in Pcbnew in a component it will update the schematic and point to that component. What type of communication like this could be possible to do between Pcbnew and 3d-viewer? What type of other information can it share (in "real-time") ? (Ex: footprint selected, track selected, pad selected, ... component moved or placed .. ) ?


It is OK if you would like to point me some parts on the code to have a look regarding this questions.

Hoping hear from you...

Rgds,
Mario Luzeiro